Navigate:

Portraits of senators as actual legislators

Maine Sen. Susan Collins’s portrait highlighted her efforts to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina. After seeing the government’s poor response to the hurricane, Collins and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman tackled FEMA’s disaster preparedness, co-sponsoring legislation to replace it with a new agency, the National Preparedness and Response Authority.

When the administration signaled its opposition, Collins said in a statement that even the White House, “in its own Katrina report, … called for a number of reorganizations and changes to this dysfunctional agency.” Collins and Lieberman reached an agreement with House and Senate negotiators, and President George W. Bush signed the bill into law in October 2006.

Text Size

-

+

reset

The legislation, Collins said, “will go far [in] ensuring that we will have a far more effective structure to protect our fellow citizens’ lives and livelihoods from disaster.”

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin also got a spot on one of the walls of the gallery. Lautenberg spotlighted Harkin’s work on the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed with overwhelming support in 1990. The civil rights law ensures people with disabilities equal access to public facilities and transportation as well as businesses. “In short, the ADA is about ensuring that people with disabilities have an equal chance at living the American dream,” Harkin said when President George H.W. Bush signed the bill. In the signing of the bill, Bush said, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”

Lautenberg’s installation commemorates what Harkin said then was “one of the proudest achievements of my life.”

Part of the reason she’s in the know about what these senators have accomplished, Lautenberg said, is because she has “a front-row seat [to] witnessing history being made.” But for “most people, you walk down the street, and you ask people who their senators are, and they don’t know,” she told POLITICO. “They don’t know what their senators have done.”

She said she plans to add senators from the 111th Congress to the exhibit and write a book about her project and the senators’ legislative legacy.